In 1862, under the Great Qing Dynasty, the first English Language School was officially opened by the Chinese Government to train ten men for the newly created diplomatic corps (Deyi, Diary of a Chinese Diplomat, 1992 Panda books).

Now China annually recruits 60,000 “Foreign Experts” to teach English as a second language (ESL) at an estimated cost of 10 billion Yuan. According to some sources, there are 120,000 foreign ESL teachers working in china.

Foreign English teachers have been coming into China since the 1980's when new opportunities for private language education began to evolve. Many foreigners found their way to the cities to find themselves in demand for their natural oral conversation skills.

It did not take long for the word to spread to schools and other training institutions. With news of this escalating need beginning to reach foreign shores, recruiting programs were set up to cater for the growing numbers of prospective teachers.

Enter NETWORKESL, established to “build the bridge”. ESL is taught throughout China in public and private kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools, high schools, universities, colleges, private business institutes and language training centers.

The curriculum for ESL teaching in public institutions is broken down into separate classes for teaching vocabulary, reading comprehension, listening comprehension and oral conversation.

In private institutions, ESL is taught as a uniform subject. As a result, public school students with five or more years of ESL classes are quite well schooled in grammatical rules but less advanced in conversation. However, private English Language School students are quite capable of producing English conversation within eight to ten months and, thus, are able to advocate and debate in English after only about one year of ESL training.